Tahlia Palmer: Steady Eye

We’re all familiar with the idea of aliens, those little/big grey humanoids from outer space who come down to visit earth occasionally, abducting unsuspecting campers/farmers, conducting impromptu surgeries, and stealing the blood from cows out in the sticks of America, leaving little calling cards in the form of mathematically perfect shapes imprinted on fields of wheat and whatnot. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it everywhere.

BUT. But… consider that this whole concept, whether or not you realised it before, is nothing more than a theory. A hypothesis if you will. A proposed theory that attempts to explain these things which are, by their very nature, inexplicable. Because, seriously, how the shit do crop circles happen? If you’ve read more than four articles about them from different sources, you would be familiar with the idea that it could be fucking anything- no one knows for sure, it can’t be solidly proven. And these grey men that are ubiquitous in abduction stories, how the shit do they even work? How do we know if it’s all real or not? Or even HOW real, given that we all have a different definition of reality. And if your definition of reality is a concretely physical one, and these grey guys exist within it, how is it that this race of beings knows to come to this planet to find life, and why do they give a fuck whether or not our internal organs are working etc, and why the FUCK do they want cow blood? WHY DO WE ASSUME THEY CARE? Are we that narcissistic? Weird little grey men? From somewhere else? Why do they look like us? What about the reptilian humanoids? A resounding WTF goes out amongst us rational folk. Of course aliens aren’t real. Nothing is proven. Etcetera etcetera.

But all his weird shit keeps coming up on youtube and blogs and forums and movies and all of that, so we’ve got to have our theories on it. And since the 1960’s there generally accepted that idea is that “aliens” are from somewhere other than Earth. However, it’s worth considering, for the pure sake of thought experimentation at least, that they could very well come from… here on Earth. Woahhhhh, whuuuuut, am I crazy??

Hear me out.

Let’s just say that UFOs and crop circles are, in fact, real life phenomena that have nothing to do with prankster human beings. And abductions are more than just repressed childhood sexual abuse memories confused with images from pop culture. It has been proposed, specifically by a man named Mac Tonnies, that all the things we associate with extraterrestrials could potentially come from Earth, from an as yet unfamiliar species- cryptoterriestrials, who live so far beyond what we imagine is possible that we have no way of seeing them for how they really are. Like a goldfish who knows human society only from what it sees from its bowl.

It’s an interesting concept, not only the proposed theory itself, but the reasoning by which he came to it, and the reaction he received. Frustrated with the status quo in UFOlogy, Tonnies was aware that if another intelligent race of beings did exist, the likelihood that they originate from the same planet as us is somewhat higher than that of a similar looking life form evolving on a different planet. He did some digging, applied the theory to ufo phenomena and found that it is just as valid, if not more so, than the ET theory.

Something interesting to note on beliefs about aliens is that they tend to be indicative of our attitude towards our role on the planet- a point that was brought up while listening to this one. So if champions of the ET hypothesis believe some dudes are out in space, watching down over us, keeping tabs and occasionally telling us stuff, it seems to me that they’re pretty eager to look for a “higher being”, a voice to tell them what to do, how to do it, and where to go. Those who believe in the CT hypothesis seem more inclined to admit that it’s possible these other beings potentially wouldn’t give a fuck about our species, other than the fact we’re digging up the planet we share, and we’re making a terrible mess of it, and there is no point looking to the heavens for answers when, realistically, we’ve kinda just got to get back to keeping the planet safe for us to live on for as long as possible.

Or maybe we are being controlled by them, reptilian overlord styles! Maybe this thing I’m doing with my brain isn’t free thinking at all, but is actually the output of some code that an alien scientist implanted within my bodily things to make me THINK I’m doing things of my own volition, when in fact I’m just helping them fulfill whatever goals they’re using me to achieve.

Anyway, it’s worth taking this thought experiment as an example and using the questioning of the norm in all things. Apply some critical thinking, then get creative with the fill in answers. If the little grey men are here, walking among us or hiding or whatever, it seems no less possible to me than if they were hovering in the sky. And given the evidence for it displayed all over the media, I certainly see it as a possibility that Julia Gillard is, in fact, a robot, and not human at all.